Honour is not just a matter of internal good feeling, but also of external behaviour.
And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love’s last days had come.
The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. “He took his own life” is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands – and then out of them. How few of us – we that remain – can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories.
To die from ‘a draining away of one’s strength caused by extreme old age’ was in Montaigne’s day a ‘rare, singular and extraordinary death.’ Nowadays we assume it as our right.
My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for – and whose noble gesture reemphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. ‘Most lives’: my life.
Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.
For Montaigne, the death of youth, which so often takes place unnoticed is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as ‘death’ is no more than the death of old age... The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth crabbed and regretful age.
Well, in one sense, I can’t know what it is that I don’t know. That’s philosophically self-evident.
Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.
But he would never join their number, never be a member of the smiling retinue of former lovers. He considered that sort of behavior rather beastly, in fact immoral. He refused to be turned from a lover into a dear friend. He was uninterested in that transition.
But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions – and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives – then I plead guilty.
Every day is Sunday” – that wouldn’t make a bad epitaph, would it?
Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It’s just a phase, they would insist. You’ll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life – and truth, and morality, and art – far more clearly than our compromised elders.
It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths.
But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.
Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination – the prompter’s voice at his ear – which had added the words “for ever.” He hadn’t asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time.
One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That.
You realize that tough love is also tough on the lover.
You only had to look at Noah and his wife, or at their three sons and their three wives, to realize what a genetically messy lot the human race would turn out to be.
One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped – it was his only hope now – that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying, would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely.